Wednesday, June 27, 2012

The Dangers of Too Much Ambition in Health Information Exchange

Tripathi, Micky."The Dangers of Too Much Ambition in Health Information Exchange." iHealthBeat, June 22, 2012

 

From the article: "For those of us who've been toiling in the trenches of health information exchange for a number of years, we're finally living the dream. According to a 2011 KLAS report and a more recent Chilmark report, the HIE market is poised for spectacular growth over the next couple of years. Most of this growth will be driven more by "private" HIE efforts (enterprise efforts usually driven by a hospital system and/or physician organization) than by "public" ones (cross-organization regional or state collaborations usually seeded with government funds), but, regardless of what is driving it, the reality is that HIE is sprouting all around us.

I'm delighted that we're moving rapidly in this direction, but one concern keeps nagging away at the back of my mind, and that is the propensity to pursue over-architected HIE solutions. … What is an over-architected HIE? Put simply, it's one that tries to do too much for too many with not enough money and time. It tries to establish an all-encompassing infrastructure and service to meet multiple, heterogeneous current and future requirements of multiple, heterogeneous current and future customers. It tries to do all of this with a shoestring budget and staff. And worst of all, it focuses more on long-term potential "big-bang" value at the expense of short-term, realizable, incremental value." Read more